Water Resources and Environment

The research activities to be developed by the Research Area of Competence of “Water Resources and Environment” (WRE) under the 2015-2020 Strategic Programme will be focused on increasing knowledge in two broad fields: urban systems in a changing environment with the scope of redesigning systems enhancing quality of life, both within and beyond the urban environment and the social and economic shape of the city; and risk management and public health, considering key issues related to the assessment of infrastructures and the evaluation of disaster risks in order to better protect public health and contribute to increase resilience to natural calamities.

Research on “urban systems in a changing environment” will be organised in two main project areas: development of innovative solutions for water and wastewater systems, namely in rainwater applications and treated wastewater reuse, in low cost solutions for sanitation in high populated peri-urban zones, and in sustainable urban planning and water management; and searching for innovative approaches in water resources management under climate change challenges, including adaptive approaches to water resources management facing to climate change, the water–energy nexus in the context of sustainability, and solutions for the future water and energy threats.

Research on “risk management and public health” will be organised in two main project areas: risk assessment and risk management in urban water systems; and flooding risk assessment and risk management. The first area will cover topics of public health impacts of urban sanitary infra-structures, safety planning methodologies applied in drinking water and wastewater systems, and new concepts in risk analysis in urban water systems. The second area will focus on innovative approaches in forecast and manage floods in urban contexts, namely in developing and applying innovative hydrologic and hydrodynamics modelling, using ICT in developing decision support systems for floods forecasting, and implementing a centre of excellence in urban flood forecasting.

A set of experiments using state of the art techniques is proposed, in order to perform a detailed analysis of sediment mechanics under different flow conditions by looking at the sediment scale and to understand the mechanisms behind large scale processes such as scour. A deeper and accurate vision of granular mechanics from the statistical point of view is expected at the end of this project. This will be achieved by an independent confirmation of existing results, the application of existing mathematical and numerical models to different cases, rather than the 1D flows found in the literature. The partners involved in this project will benefit in first hand from a solid discharge meter; a combined PIV+PTV (Particle Image Velocimetry + Particle Tracking Velocimetry respectvely) and an accurate numerical model capable of describing local scour based on sediment dynamics.

Main Equipments

The Bubbler Flow Module uses an internal air compressor to force a metered amount of air through a bubble line submerged in the flow channel to accurately determine the water level, converting this value to flow rate. This method is suitable for small channels, and it is not affected...

The Isco 674 Rain Gauge is a precision instrument that uses a tipping bucket design for rainfall measurement. It has an 8-inch diameter orifice and is factory-calibrated, allowing to: - store rainfall data in internal memory for retrieval and analysis with Isco Flowlink® Software...

Hydroinformatics Laboratory is a facility of the Department of Civil Engineering of University of Minho that makes available numerical modeling applications for solving hydraulics and water resources problems and where different hydroinformatic tools were developed...

About CTAC

The Centre for Territory, Environment and Construction (CTAC) is a research unit of the School of Engineering of University of Minho (UMinho), recognised by the “FCT – Fundação para a Ciência e Tecnologia” (Foundation for Science and Technology), associated to the Department of Civil Engineering (DEC), with whom it shares resources and namely human resources.

Currently CTAC aggregates 37 researchers holding a PhD of which 27 are faculty professors of the Civil Engineering Department.